


You'll hear me howling

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M, GSC's Cornucopia Pornicopia challenge, Little Red Riding Hood - Freeform, comic fixit fic, in fact lets mine popular culture for all its worth shall we?, shameless songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 02:06:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5188052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Texan woods are a long way from Wisconsin pine forest, but the wash of green and the sun shining on her face is enough to remind her of the girl she used to be, before all this. It could be a start, she thinks, eyeing the holes in the roof and the sagging timbers. She could be an innocent here, wear red and skip through the forest to Willoughby, and convince everyone she’s never even heard of the big bad wolf. It’s not like anyone left in town knows how good a liar she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You'll hear me howling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SparrowHawke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SparrowHawke/gifts).



> This is simultaneously a comic fix-it fic, started for the GoodShipCharloe’s fix-it challenge, and finished for the Thanksgiving event, Cornucopia Pornucopia. It takes the title and much of its atmosphere from my absolute favourite song in many moons, Hozier’s It Will Come Back. And a very happy birthday to Sparrowhawke, who was one of the first people to comment on my Charloe fic and helped convince me I should write more :D

She stumbles across it chasing a wounded buck, a tumbledown shack a mile or two into the woods to the east of Willoughby. At first, it’s just a pit stop, a handy place to dress her rabbits or glut herself on the sweet well water someone has left behind. But as the heat of summer starts to wane, Charlie regularly finds herself sitting on the porch in a patch of early morning sun, her bow cast aside, enraptured by the beauty of the morning.  

This sheltered, private spot on the back porch would be a good place for a chair, she thinks. Maybe one of those old-fashioned two person things – a loveseat, her gramma used to call them.

Not that there’s another person in her life. There never really was, she tells herself, annoyed that her mind has already pulled up his face, that last time she saw him, eyes ablaze and hands bloody in the wake of yet another of their workaday massacres.   By the time they’d chased the last of the Patriots out, then set their sights on the Nano, she had fooled herself into believing he would always come back. But losing Connor had been too much for him to bear, and in her own grief for Rachel, she never realises that their very first kiss was his way of saying goodbye.

She and Miles trudge back to Willoughby together, sure he’ll be waiting for them, then rattle about in Gene’s house until Miles is railroaded into joining Blanchard’s government in Austin. Charlie has a fancy invitation of her own, but decides to ignore it. Willoughby is as much home as anywhere else, and she doesn’t want to be uprooted again.

Every now and then she writes Miles to see if he’s heard anything of Bass, a job somewhere, or a fight, but as his answers get increasingly terse, she stops asking. Miles doesn’t handle guilt well, and Bass is his blackest, most tender bruise. Besides the uncomfortable fact of her own paternity, of course, and don’t those two sore spots add up to one massive shitstorm waiting to happen.

Miles had asked, once, if something was going on between the two of them. No, Charlie had said, nothing. “Not a damn thing,” and even she had recoiled at the bitterness in her voice, loaded with something she hadn’t admitted to herself yet.

But there’s a lot of competition in that department, so many things to straighten out in her head, things that cut deeper than any wound she’s taken from a sword, and churn her guts more than slitting a man’s throat in cold blood. Maybe one day, she hopes, she’ll be ready for a two-person kind of life. But right now, four months after Bradbury, twelve months after Austin, three years after walking away from her life in Wisconsin, she’s licking her wounds. Figuring out who she wants to be, and what she wants from life.

Uncomplicated is good. Free. Happy seems too much to ask for.

The Texan woods are a long way from Wisconsin pine forest, but the wash of green and the sun shining on her face is enough to remind her of the girl she used to be, before all this. It could be a start, she thinks, eyeing the holes in the roof and the sagging timbers. She could be an innocent here, wear red and skip through the forest to Willoughby, and convince everyone she’s never even heard of the big bad wolf.

It’s not like anyone left in town knows how good a liar she is. How much of a master of disguise.

Word gets out that Doc Porter’s granddaughter – too serious for some, but real pretty when she smiles - is fixing up the old cottage in the woods.

“Planning to stay awhile?” the lumberjack asks her as he picks out the straightest logs his yard, and “let me know if you want anything built.” The blacksmith, a muscled giant she can’t help ogling, offers to come out to shoe her horse, and the sexy young bartender visits every week to bring her a bottle of whiskey and the news of her uncle’s exploits in Austin.

“Hear anything about General Monroe?” she asks, and he frowns, as if disgusted.

“Nobody’s General now,” he scoffs. “Just another old soldier that’s pissed off he’s got no one left to kill. He came into the bar a couple of weeks back looking for your uncle. Some old guy made a crack about the Butcher – beggin’ your pardon Charlie – and Monroe lost it. Nearly tore him apart.”

“Goodness. How scary. He leave town after that?”

“I’m guessing so. After drinking every last drop of rotgut in the place. Probably dead in a ditch by now – no loss if you ask me.”

The bartender, who’d made it into her bed three times more often than any of the other boys, finds himself backed up against the wall with Charlie’s knife at his throat.   When he brings a bottle of whiskey and a big bunch of roses to apologise a few days later, she’s smiles prettily as she takes possession of the whiskey, then rips the flower heads off every last stalk to throw in his face. She might be trying for a new Charlie, but that doesn’t mean she’ll let anyone take potshots at her family.

She leaves the bottle of whiskey sitting on the porch by the loveseat her lumberjack had helped her build.

Come morning, it’s a quart gone, and the glass she left next to it is overflowing with several brown, fleshy fruits she doesn’t recognise.

She’s tearing into her third when she looks up to find him watching her from the edge of the clearing. She smiles, and gets up to greet him, but he melts back into the trees before her boots hit the bottom step.

Charlie rolls her eyes and waits.

*

It’s past midnight when she hears the timbers creak on the back porch, and she stands by her window watching the moon carve its way across the sky for long enough to be sure that he’s well settled into his whiskey.

She’d found the cloak in her grandmother’s closet. Grandpa Gene had watched her with tears in his eyes as she tried it on, and shown the pictures of her Grandma Charlotte wearing it – it had been their honeymoon, Grandpa had explained, in Paris, France. He’d taken her to the opera, and she’d worn this long, red cloak over the most beautiful gown he’d ever seen.

Charlie wears it over bare skin.

He’s sprawled across the loveseat, drinking straight from the bottle, staring out into the night.   “Go back to bed, Charlie.”

“I wanted to thank you for the … fruit. Those brown ones.”

“Figs,” he says, eyes still fixed on the treeline. “Found them in an overgrown garden on the other side of town. Thought you could use ‘em.”

“Thank you. They were delicious.”

He salutes her with the bottle, and bows his head mockingly in reply. “Thank you for the whiskey. Your boy toy know you’re sharing it with me?”

“He said you deserved to be dead in a ditch somewhere. Whiskey was the least of his worries,” Charlie grins, teeth flashing sharp and white in the moonlight.

Bass grins back, and it’s a blinding thing that makes it easy to forgive his general asshattery. It makes her rash and bold, that smile. “Why do you care, Bass? Why did you kiss me?”

He shrugs, defensive, then goes on the attack. “I was fresh out of self-restraint that day,” he jabs, “and someone had to drag the Mathesons out of the self-pity pit. Would have kissed Miles if I thought that’d work.”

Charlie raises one eyebrow until he caves.

“I’d been wanting you a while. Got sick of telling myself no, and I thought it might be the last chance I ever got.”

“But you came back.”

“Turns out I really am the codependent schmuck your mother accused me of being.”  

“You were looking for Miles,” she nods, saddened, but he doesn’t let her finish.

“So why aren’t I in Austin, then, Charlotte? Why am I skulking around your cottage, creeping onto your porch in the dead of night, not even trusting myself to look at you?”

“When you figure it out, Bass? You tell me,” Charlie snaps with a flash of arctic-blue eyes. The last fig, she notices, is still sitting on the porch railing, and she crosses in front of him to pick it up, heedless of the wind tugging at hem of her long cloak. She’s holding out her hand for his knife when she realises his gaze is riveted to a long expanse of bare leg.

“Borrow your knife?” she asks, surprised at just how steady her voice is when her pulse is suddenly anything but.

“You’re not trying to kill me again, are you?”

“Maybe,” she smirks, holding his gaze as she slices into the fig, the two halves parting to reveal the secretive folds of the interior. She hands him one, then the knife, before biting down, eyes closing at the heady flavour. When she opens them again he can’t quite hide the naked hunger on his face.

She runs her tongue over the glowing, juicy flesh and smirks at his strangled groan. “Maybe that’s my plan. Or maybe … ” she licks her fingers clean, then nudges her way between his legs, staring down into his face as she forces herself to run straight at the edge of the cliff. “I’m doing my best to make sure you’ll never leave me again.”

His eyes burn with questions that she can only find one way to answer, so she reaches for his hand and brings it up to the silken ribbons that tie the cloak closed between her breasts.

He tugs at the bow, plays with it, then ignores the ribbons to slip his fingers underneath the blood red silk to stroke her bare skin. Charlie’s breath catches in her throat as the long suppressed attraction raises its hackles and starts to howl. He’s only using the pads of his fingers, she tells herself. Barely grazing the curve of her waist. She shouldn’t, it can’t, it’s not …

Pure need rips free of her throat and edges her voice with desperation. “Don't you dare, Bass. Don’t tease. Two years and nine months and it’s been eating me alive every damn day.”

She can see him counting back, see the hunger spark in him as he pinpoints the moment. “Poor Charlie. Did you see it in my eyes that day? Did you hate yourself for wanting me?”

“Yes,” she hisses back. “Even when you were hunting us. Even after your helicopters killed my brother, and tortured my friends … even then, it was your face I would see. That look – like you planned to eat me up.”

“Oh, I did. Do you know how close to disaster you came that day? How I nearly had you dragged into my office just so you could defy me again? I dreamed about it for months – first I’d spank you like the child you were, then I’d fuck you with my fingers until you came so hard you saw stars. Begging for me. Begging for my cock.”

Bass is half expecting her to recoil from him, to tell him he’s sick and perverted and this is all a mistake – because God knows, it is – but he should know better than to expect a Matheson to do the reasonable thing. Her skin is burning under his fingers, and he can feel her heart trying to crash its way out of her ribcage, but she never looks away even once.

Rocks into him, in fact, pushing her breasts into his hands, the soft handfuls topped with desperately hard nipples that beg for his attention. He pushes the cloak wide, letting the moonlight silver her skin, breasts high and proud and perfect above a flat belly and a nest of dark curls. She’s already soaked with arousal, he notes, nervous, but not enough to make her stop.

“I was a monster, Charlie. I _am_ a monster,” he whispers in her ear as his fingers slick themselves in her juices.   He needs to taste her more than he needs to breathe, in case she actually decides to listen to him. “Don’t do this. Don’t invite me in. All I’ve ever done is tear your life apart, and that’s not what I want for you. Please.”

She tangles her fingers with his and slowly tugs them back to her midline and up to where the bow dangles between her breasts.

“But don’t you know the story? The Big Bad Wolf follows Little Red to the house in the middle of the woods, and waits in bed for her. What big ears you have, she says, and he tells her he wants to listen to her. What big eyes you have, and he says that all he'll ever want to look at is her.   And when he tells her he wants to eat her up, Little Red puts down her basket, takes off her cloak, and climbs into his lap.”

“Why?”

“Because no one else could ever made her feel so wanted. So powerful. So hungry,” she stresses, heart racing as the red silk pools around her feet between one breath and the next. The arousal in his eyes explodes into raw lust, so wild and feral it makes her stand straighter, their eyes locked as she covers herself in his scent and smears his want all over her soul. She needs, she needs ... she lunges, tearing his shirt open with one desperate yank, biting and licking at his chest even as her hands fumble with his belt. Bass bucks underneath her mouth, but still manages to lift his hips to help her pull his belt free, then shoves his jeans around his ankles in one almighty push.

“Are you sure, Charlie?” he bites out as she scrambles into his lap, knees spread wide. She raises one eyebrow in sheer incredulity, then starts to slide her wet sex back and forth over the tip of his leaking cock.

“If you were such a monster, would you even be asking that now?” she demands, movements suddenly unsteady as his cockhead starts to edge into her channel. “Without the Big Bad Wolf, Little Red will never get what she needs. No one else will ever see her for who she is.”

"Because Little Red is a wolf too," he murmurs, gobsmacked by the revelation.

She bites him in celebration, a bloodied patch right over his heart, before she climbs up his body to purr in his ear. “Yes. And no one e-else,” she stutters as she tilts her hips to claim his rigid cock, “could ever make her ho-howl like he does.”

He finds himself surrendering with an almighty surge upwards, his hands clamping down hard on her hipbones as the warm, wet haven engulfs his cock. The sensation is astonishing, wet velvet swallowing hot steel, but it’s the emotional storm that overwhelms him completely.

She tastes of figs, and forgiveness, and the sort of mercy he’d forgotten could exist in the world. She feels like home, and hearth and his, and if she lets him stay, if she takes him to her bed … he knows who he is. How he loves.

Little Red will have the wolf at her back for as long as she wants him there.  Longer, probably.

They make love slowly, that first time, her aching breasts dragging over his chest, their hands tangled in each other’s hair, mouths and bodies refusing to part now that they’ve finally found their way together. The second time, passion overtakes them as they sit side by side on the porch steps, sharing the last mouthfuls of the bartender’s whiskey. He slides into her from behind this time, making her buck and writhe and yell as his fingers twist her nipples and flick at her clit.

The third time, though.

The third time, their howls fill the woods with joy, and the very moon stops to listen.

_fin_


End file.
